inspiration, echoes, copy-cats ...

last week Friday I realized that two of the 6 presented 1-min. extracts from the Anniversary performances at tic tac art center in Brussels echoed two dances of mine, remarkably close, and during the same evening that Wendy Perron performed a touching and beautifully crafted personal solo there. 

here are the links to recordings of the dances, followed by the dances that I recognized in them:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C-xQUlWMRQx/?img_index=7
Corbul/Raven (2009)

https://www.instagram.com/p/C-xQUlWMRQx/?img_index=5
Sokrates (2001/2014)

the latter obviously is connected via the costume. this costume is one that I "borrowed" from Elaine Summers and her use of it in her pieces like theater piece for chairs and ladders (1965) and walking dance for any # (1969) incl. a concert at St. Mark's Church in New York city. it became a kind of trademark for my own "white" series of dances that I began around 1997, which were out in the open, quite friendly-connective, and community-oriented, incl. Kruisingen (crossings) Heemraadsplein (2009) and its continuation into Delfshaven Dans!

more thoughts
copying can definitely be a form of flattery, especially when the copyist re-creates something instead of re-using a ready-made for personal gain and career, without having to invest more deeply in the source, let alone not naming the sources, no matter how seemingly obscure or 'unimportant'. the echo of the Raven solo at tic tac art center beautifully re-creates the costume (all black) the flurry moves forward and backward, the silence, and the expressive hands.  

during my own career i have used liberally from Elaine Summers and Trisha Brown, as inspiration, strategies, vocabularies etc., as well as from many others, for various reasons. more than one piece of music, fine-arts etc. has found its way into my own works. 

if indeed both choreographers echoed works of mine, then I am happy to see that neither of them has my body-type.

professional ecology
acknowledging one's sources openly would make our ecosystem in dance more complex, a bit less "simple" but like other credits they could help funnel means, energy-attention, awareness to dancers who may not have the same means or inclination of dissemination, but do have enough to create their work, on their terms, and meaningful enough to be copied from or echoed. 

in an environment structured from a false and untenable interpretation of "survival of the fittest" and feudal-neoliberal (pseudo)Darwinian competition for (artificially low-kept = ) scarce means, such a strategy takes away from the "new", "lonely genius", etc. but it does make for stronger inter-connectivity as an eco-system over time.

fortunately there is by a now a greater conversation about culturally formed privileges, who gets to do what when and why, intersectionality, etc. etc. etc. one may say this is public honoring of lineages could be a further extension of such net-working, open-source. each one of us has a different (personal, professional) situation, and so will make different choices. 

 

money, flow-control, durability, sustainability

living in a large apartment with high ceilings is wonderful for a spacious home and can be a challenge in colder winters and chilly spring and autumn times, especially for a dancer. these days i learned that the city of Rotterdam annually produces ca. 6000 kg of sheep-wool from grazing (instead of lawn mowers) (methane vs. other emissions?) and that this wool for now is either burned or shipped off to China, when it could be used locally, e.g. for isolation of roofs and houses. 

artist and researcher Christine Meindertsma was a driving force in a specific project in 2020 how this situation could be improved. her project-counterpart at the Rotterdam municipality,  Carolien van Eykelen, stated that as of now the project is finished, it is time for someone with an enterprise (= willing to invest money) to make something out of it. (scroll down to the video on the page, it is very beautifully done, duration 10min.) 

while I could find at least one Dutch company offering wollen blankets in the Netherlands, I could not (yet) find out how and where the wool is farmed or processed further into their textiles. the other products that are available locally include products from Sweden, where the sheep wool partly comes from New Zealand, ... or another company, farmed and processed locally in Norway. all three options seem preferable to yet more oil-based synthetic plastic fibres and more microplastic ... finally, I found out that there is a Rotterdam-based company offering ecological thermal isolation. if I buy the booklet at nearly 20 euros, honoring the pioneering work and time that the CEO has done ...

for isolating my apartment as a tenant, I would think of removable pieces that I can attach to the walls, lay down on the ground floor underneath the carpet, or at the very least, install as an isolating curtain at strategically useful places in the apartment for better thermal isolation overall. so far I believe that I definitely have no need for a very high quality of wool. until there is a more mainstream-friendly solution, once again it seems that money, and/or lack of (access to) it produce a bottle-neck situation, that only a sufficient amount of money will be able to change. (of course there are always the second-hand stores ... )

overall this research has got me thinking about cash flow, basic income, and who gets to control this flow of income & ability to buy/exchange goods, and the power given with such ability (let alone the case of reparations for Transatlantic Slavery, colonizations worldwide etc.) 

according to earlier statements that I remember via XR Rotterdam, the city alone emits ca. 20% of all greenhouse gases in the Netherlands. the overall development for the entire country seems more a bit more positive (source) 2022 also saw more independent(?) research done in this direction, alas two new coal power plants, built in 2015 and 2016 made the target of reduction of 50% greehouse gases by next year (2025) impossible, which had been a target before ...

whoever profits from fossil-fuels for heating this city, likely has a vested interest in not allowing local wool to be used for isolating people's homes on a larger scale, allowing better saving on ever rising (fossil-fueled) energy prices, for a population that gets to deal with ever rising economic inequality. ( = at times directly related to causes for reparations ... **)  any connections of such companies with local politicians, past and present, would also be useful to know. 

** before painting too bleak a picture, the city did hand out a one-time support of 500 and 800 euro to people indicating a need, to help save on the worst of spikes, as did the Dutch government for 2021-2022 to help soften the increase) 

as a dancer, I work in this urban environment and its consequences, from the soot I keep finding in collectible rainwater from refineries and cruise-ships *** to making a living for producing autonomous dance work on a minimal, but still effective scale of means.

*** as can be seen here, such soot also can easily come from as far as RWE in West Germany documented by Last Gasp / 2-min. info video   

while I still claim the right and the social means to keep producing such work, without having to defend (again) whether what I do is "useful" and by which standards (usually against "conservatives" or the latest populist merchants of doubt such as in 2011 ... ) this does not mean that I am not interested in better overall living conditions, which may also help produce more autonomous "unnecessary" dance work ...

decolonization, reparations, Kinetic Awareness®, the legacy of Elaine Summers, and the danger of the simple/single story

in times of acute crisis, a painkiller may be the only means to get at least a semblance of rest, even if the problem causing the pain is still as violent as ever. but at least for a moment, there is time and space to think more clearly again, not be consumed by the pain. the longer and more costly road is healing, finding the root cause, working on understanding and what works to help it get better, where and when needed. 

in the regions of the world influenced by European cultural zones, the 20th century brought us many more simple and single stories, good and bad, black and white, evil and noble, a direct consequence from the previous centuries. it takes time, and means to grow out of them, find the necessary details. as Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointed out not so long ago, there are very real-world dangers in the differences with the nuances of real word details. 

trans BIPOC writer Kai Cheng Thom equally writes about transformative justice, which looks at entire affected communities working together, even when just one or a few individuals have been affected by wrongdoing.

reparations could then mean re-balancing, healing. this is very different from a winner making a looser pay up, because they finally lost. (though to some extent, that, too can be a part, if not only to stop an aggressor) currently, realizing that our existence on this planet as a species is getting lost for good and with all consequences. doing what is still possible to minimize the inevitable losses. and realizing that no single one of us can do it alone, we must make concert-ed efforts for a longer time. 

on this blog and elsewhere i have written a lot about Elaine Summers, Kinetic Awareness® and the nuance they enable. of course I am personally biased, since they worked so well for me. at the same time, this is what I  have worked on just about all my life and what I can offer, for when and where it may work well beyond my own limitations, not more and not less. 

fortunately I am not alone with this, on www.kineticawarenesscenter.org and www.elainesummersdance.com and www.skytime.org/skyworksnew.html there are many more for starters, as there are related people from all walks of life. as Dr. Jill Green stated in a paper on dance and discipline, the image is that of a tree, made up of many roots and many branches. there are many trees, many mycelia, and so on, all over this planet, at least still for now.

worldwide Gay and Queer alternative theater by the 1970s ... where are they now?

yesterday I had the deep pleasure of attending the performance of Flamencoqueer (instagram) from Barcelona at gallery Joey Ramone in Rotterdam for their finissage with visual artist Anna Moreno (instagram). it was a wonderful and very powerful experience, the second performance even partly became an intermedia-event, where the live performance of the dancer & musician on the installation directly interacted with the dance on film/video that kept being projected. 

Anna told me later that in the 1970s Barcelona had known an entire scene of Gay and queer flamenco dancers, but that with ever more touristification they eventually vanished for straight(ened out?) "traditional" interpretations.

this morning I realized that this era had indeed seen quite a bit of Gay and Queer "Dionysian" theater and dance worldwide, from the Cockettes in San Francisco, to Dzi Croquettes in Rio de Janeiro to Lindsay Kemp in London (his students David Bowie/Ziggy Startdust and Kate Bush made commercially successful crossovers into pop-music ... ) let alone the Radical Faeries in the US. there was Studio 54 and Disco Music. all gone. 

only Butoh in Japan seems to have survived, the Radical Faeries went underground, too many died during the AIDS epidemic but had no followers. the ballroom scene in Harlem and the greater US of A on Turtle Island, largely remained underground until the 1990s.

these days there are remnants and re-vivals, even commercially exploited re-discoveries (e.g. of Julius Eastman, James Baldwin) but times have changed and become if anything more mercilessly commercial, often superficial, making a living has become a lot more cut-throat, even for those of us in the Global North of the European colonizing countries.

Art, hope, dance, mo(ve)ment ...

How conversations can go:

Just this afternoon my colleague Elie Nassar and I talked about unravelling societies and breaking down of systems meant for survival. How to survive what feels like a new 'Ancien Regime': an environmentally, financially, and otherwise untenable group of people whose continued actions are ruining everything on a planetary scale, destroying our very species, for a culture of goals that are literally insane, even if presently they may seem the pinnacle of Power. (so were once National/Socialists, Kings, Religious quests etc.)

And then to enjoy these 30 minutes of "Art resisting/despite War" by ARTE, featuring my colleague Tebby WT RAMASIKE working with fellow-South African visual artist Bruce Clarke, on a site of terror in #Kaunas #EuropeanCulturalCapital2022 (around 13min11 into the video)

https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/105616-007-A/twist/

Reminded that #GeorgeMaciunas who originated the rather spritely-adverse-humorous #Fluxus came from Kaunas. The 1/3 Jewish population of Lithuania that has literally been exterminated during Nazi-Occupation, save for those who like Clarke's or #WilliamKentridge 's grandparents could escape.

The presented works of Aiste Ramunaite can remind anyone of #CoBrA in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium after WWII : spontaneity, organic forms, colorist, elements from substrate (folk) art that survived Christianization, even linear Rationality, in a strikingly similar language.

Not mentioned here, Lithuania is a key #EU country working more closely with and towards officially recognizing #Taiwan. By doing this, it is now on a global axis point between two "opening" countries on the planet, (#Ukraine is the other) each threatened in its existence by an Imperialist Old Power at its borders, also two of the BRICS, unfortunately, several of whom are currently governed disastrously by Populist Presidents.

//

Art can do a lot, and it was good to be reminded of art that was created in Lithuania during Soviet Occupation. Personal, momentary, small-scale, furtive, unofficial, open-ended, immersive, direct. Dance, coming from our experience of our moving bodymindbeings, originally a tangible art-form, can lead us back there, again & again. (which explains why it is so heavily regulated, censored, kept in formula, guarded jealously)

Quoting East-German writer Christa Wolf in Kassandra from 1983 : "It is the other, which they squeeze between their sharp distinctions, the Third, which in their opinion does not even exist, the smiling living, which is able to ever again bring itself forth from itself, the undivided, spirit in living, living in spirit."

And so, the work goes on.

a response to a paper by Simona Noja-Nebyla via Academia.edu

(contribution to discussion of the paper "Approaching Ballet Education Core in the 21st Century)


Dear Simona Noja-Nebyla,

Thank you very much for your generous invitation. As there are only 11 hours left for me to comment and just before I was about to go to sleep, my contributions will have to remain superficial, given with the aim to honor the invitation.

Indeed why and which aspects to preserve, maintain, keep developing? Several approaches from the same cultural zone have emerged, enriched the options.

I would invite us to treat whatever anyone of us prefer to think of as ballet as a set of related dance languages. These have evolved over time, like any other language, including English, changed considerably, reflecting social developments, sometimes galvanizing them.

The roots of what is considered ballet I would trace as much longer reaching historically than a mere 360 years, which in human terms is, more or less, one empire. As recent empires that have emanated from the European subcontinent are dissolving into something else (decolonization etc.) so comes the question of what will be maintained, by who, and for what purpose.

One comparable development may be that of Latin into the Romance languages, based on the popular, "vulgar", not the elite "classical" variance.

Today, many use the vocabulary, but often with very different substrates, underlying concepts. Just think of the epochal difference between Merce Cunningham's adaptation of what he learned as ballet-vocabulary into his own way of dancing, via the variation created by Martha Graham in the US of A, again very different from the aims of Alvin Ailey and Janet Collins. And we haven't even begun to look into related contemporary dance languages.

Status, power, imperial more than not, may very much be one of the drives, being recognized as Kings and Queens, top of the heap, having made it socio-economically, speaking the language of the Dominators. Decolonization on the one hand, Afro-/American/European/Asian dancers claiming to be just as proficient and recognized in this language as a current process on the other.

All that said, I deeply believe that every language, every dialect has their innate wisdom and usefulness, and so it is good if enough people dedicate their lives to studying a very specific language, others in sharing insights from this knowledge with others.

The many dance technical aspects of what has been derived from Classical European-formed ballet, has fortunately been challenged to the core, with what is now often referred to as Somatic Dance Techniques as an invaluable gift from the late 20th century.

Perhaps the mere kinds of mono-linear figures and forms & sequences could be interesting, comparably to the chromatic 12-tone system that has been formulated from the European cultural zone. (again in response to and dialogue with Persian, Indian, Chinese, Afro-American, and other musical developments)

For a contemporary society that has finally understood and internalized the necessity of organic connectedness, mycelial, dynamic, ever growing, creating single lines in time/space, as happens in ballet-related languages, can be a welcome option for expression.

Of the current human languages, as we enter what is currently felt to be decolonization, two, English and Spanish, followed on a further place by French stem very directly from the hybridization of Latin with various Gallo-Germanic tribes-languages and dialects.

Perhaps that is a more interesting note to end on.
I hope this was useful to read.

Best of luck!
Thomas Körtvélyessy,
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
April 23, 2022

lessons from "Raven Kassandra"

in many ways, revisiting and further developing "Raven" after its inception at Elaine Summers Dance & Film Co. / Kinetic Awareness® Center, 2005 and its first climax in 2009 at the National Dance Center in Bucharest, Romania, helped me complement & understand a lot, deeper, better.
it does make sense, the acronym BUILD (Better Understanding Involves Learning and Doing ) ...

revisiting the black series
the central equation of the piece is 1 over 0 = existence over non-existence, creating movement / process > presence vs. poetry (shaped expression)

this formula is also the base for the entire black series, of which this dance is a part. the black color could be inspired by the black clothing code of 20th century Existentialists, 1980s New Wavers. but even more importantly black as the radical absence of light, hinting at nothingness. (in 2013 I finally explored black as in Blackness, within the same series) 

none of these choices were very conscious: inspired by Meret Oppenheim, I always took the freedom to realize the pieces as they came to mind, including those that would form the austere, daunting, black series, the dark forces of nature. this existential series is always theatrical, fully absorbing, at times hermetic, cutting, austere, dramatic, but also present in the here and now of the performing moment. (like just about all of my work) 

 

no more "cold-starts" into a project
I realized while preparing for the performance that having continuously done cold-starts with the project-choreographies has been as harmful in the long term as it would be with the dancing body. 

spoken text (voice) vs. movement (text)
delving into the text "Kassandra" by Christa Wolf, exploring it in translation, from German to English, from meaning into presence, movement, props, persona's, became a main feature of the resulting performance.

elements that help to create communication in the moment
each part of the text that I decided on during the rehearsals got its costume (from just about every performance of works from the black series) 

one part already had specific lighting, the scene where Kassandra dreams of the God Apollon, giving her the gift of prophecy, but then wanting to have sex with her as a reward ...

during the performance
the drama, talking, (Tanz-)theater became very prominent, lots of spoken words, bringing me on edge as a performer, because as an actor I have little training when it comes to using my vocal chords for speaking in public. 

fortunately the speaking did not completely push back all other movements, I could dive (back) into  a continuum where movement would happen "naturally" on its own flow, at times going together with the speaking, at other times more autonomous. 

a sober cover for underlying mystery
I was surprised at my overall sobriety before, during and after the performance. I felt very matter of fact, despite the rather dramatic and existential topic and content.

the outbreaks of movement were - except towards the end- mainly "uncontrolled", uncensored, the most simple, unrestrained stream of movement. not unlike the prophetess getting overwhelmed by that piping, shrieking, ghastly little voice, hanging over her and wailing, screaming ... 

a better balance between the two extremes, ideally shaping in the moment would be good.

the outstretched arms to the side had been a very clear moment that I knew would be a corner-stone of this performance, and I am glad that I found a way into enacting them. it is very nice to have gotten a better understanding of the degree of form-alisation of action into poetry, specific words, nouns, compounds that are created to be holding specific moments of meaning. 

towards the end I did quite consciously re-enact rather specific movements from the very beginning of the Raven in 2005 : a quick contretemps of the hands and arms, triggering a vertical lunge/fall/precipice of the entire body downward. if I kept working more on this piece, listen to the dance more, would more pre-set movements emerge that would help re-enact the dance as itself? 

I was also surprised how much my voice became an exact reproduction of how I spoke the final words during the recorded performance in Bucharest.

resisting women, female resistance and silencing

countering innovation, (post)modernism

there was no music at any time in this piece, except an audio-recording of activist and co-founder of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, as she publicly denounced, ridiculed and exposed the ... shortcomings(?) of a right-wing ThinkTank defending the unilateral annihilation of the Iran Nuclear Deal by then-US president Donald Trump. I am not an uncritical admirer of her political views, but I loved how she just got up in the middle of a "serious" military meeting and started to deflate and debunk it, speaking a plain language, speaking her truth to power.

one direction that would interest me further is to explore is my long involvement with resisting, dissenting women (artists) who as often as not were downplayed and marginalised by their contemporaries: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Meret Oppenheim, Gertrude Stein, ... and/or in dance more recently Anna Halprin, Elaine Summers, Mary O'Donnell-Fulkerson, Mary Overlie, to name just a few. (update: later this year, bell hooks passed away, again an important voice who spoke out, against comfortable notions of any kind, an early advocate of James Baldwin as a Black Gay writer and thinker who just like her, prepared us for intersectionality)

these women clearly said no to then-dominant narratives that were kept over their chosen profession, they refused to give in and were in turn often bypassed, ridiculed, ignored, simply not mentioned more widely, despite their innovative achievements and hard work. 

somewhat the paths that they forged, are now more accepted and understood, even taken for granted, even if they themselves are often as not still glossed over, "forgotten", not mentioned in favour of (male) (White) and/or more recent colleagues. but their potential is still a challenge for most of us, today.

obviously there is a very patriarchal context: in a society where people who are categorised as women get blacked out by custom and design, they can be more prone to dissent and alternatives to the mainstream. (Gay men and non-genderconforming people alongside with them) but we must not forget that patriarchy is in no way more 'natural' or Goddess-given than sexual differences.

a living talking dancing book?
if I do it often enough, I could indeed become a living interpreter of the book "Kassandra", a medium interpreter, quoting each time what is the most fitting for the moment. my physicality and personality can co-create a very full, but not unbiased continuation, ... or bring my audience to read the book? (the English translation, is it good enough??)

thanks to close:
before the final rehearsal period, I had been in Berlin to present a work by Elaine Summers at POOL Shine New York Traces. (link here) that weekend, on Sunday morning, I had a long and important conversation with Yoshiko Chuma when we took a walk in a nearby park. the artistic directors of the festival, Wibke Janssen and Sara Möller also contributed directly to the inspiration of this performance. thank you!

it was also very inspiring to have Julia Hoza who came as part of her last year at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, Austria (MUK) come to follow the rehearsal process as an understudy. we talked a lot, also about both being diasporic, 2nd generation, having roots from pretty much the same region between Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary, hers Romanian, mine Hungarian and German.

with all of the above, the piece came back to itself.
thanks to Anthony Hüseyin for curating the evening, all at Ubik/Worm who made it possible, the fellow performance artists, Cuartito Azul for the safe and workable rehearsal space, A. Enser and all supporters.

videos & webpage:
https://realdancecompany.org/raven-kassandra.html